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Researcher profile: Heloisa Helena Milioli

Moving from Brazil in 2012, Heloisa Helena Milioli is now establishing her career in NSW investigating breast cancer treatments targeting hormone receptors.

Her background in biology and bioinformatics is combined with a drive to help women with breast cancer.

Heloisa made the move to Australia to further her high-quality research. It is now coming together at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research with the support of an early-career fellowship from the Cancer Institute NSW.

“Australia gives us lots of opportunities to do high-quality research and help the local and global community," Heloisa says.

"NSW has great facilities, technologies and resources. There's great support for the cancer research field here.”

What is the research?

The focus of Heloisa’s research is ‘Expanding the repertoire of therapies targeting sex steroid receptors in breast cancer’.

This is a new approach to improving outcomes for people with breast cancer; in particular, those who don’t benefit from conventional endocrine therapies.

The progress so far

“I aim to integrate all this amazing information and develop gene signatures that will bring novel insights into this hormone regulation.”

“We will find alternative targets from these signatures and translate our findings into the clinical setting.”

How did your career start?

“I'm a biologist – I decided to move into the bioinformatics field when I applied for my PhD.”

Bioinformatics is a relatively new field in cancer research combining computer science and biology.

“Here at Garvan there is a team of experts focused on bioinformatics doing a fantastic work – they look at samples from a global scale to a single cell resolution, which brings another level of detail to understand complex diseases, such as cancer.”

“For me starting out, I just found that it would be extremely relevant to diversify my expertise to be able analyse high-throughput data – and look at the data in a different way, from different perspectives.”

“Moving to bioinformatics and data science, it's adding a lot to my research.”

“My vision is to play a key role as an integral member of a collaborative team of researchers and clinicians who are focused on bringing discoveries from the laboratory into patient care, ultimately aiming to improve the disease outcomes.”